Path 2

Lady Tears Are a Boner Killer

January 7, 2011

Everybody’s been talking about this lady-crying study that just came out, in which scientists found that men who sniffed women’s tears (shed by women watching sad movies, no less), experienced, amazingly, slightly less of a desire to have sex. The actual experiment, like most actual scientific experiments, borders on the bizarre.

The team collected the tears, then used them to soak cotton pads, soaking other cotton pads in a saline solution that they dripped down the same women’s faces (the “control group,” if you will). While the 24 male volunteers couldn’t smell the difference between the tears and the saline, when asked to look at women in photographs with either the tear-soaked pad or the saline one held under their noses, sexual attraction was lower when men sniffed the real tears.

Of course, you’re a dude and you’re smelling a damp cotton pad while looking at a photo of a woman’s face. How turned on are you going to be?

To really confirm things, the scientists also made men watch sad movies and measured their testosterone levels, finding that those dropped only in the men smelling the tears. And then they made them watch “sexually arousing films” while in an MRI. Those who smelled the tears had less arousal, yet again.

Well, that cemented it! Lady tears have chemicals in them that make men not want to have sex. (Interestingly, the tears do not, actually, make men sad or empathetic — they mostly just make men want you to stop crying.) Scientists see the depleted sexual desire as a side effect and not the main purpose of the tears, but a side effect nonetheless. And to think all these years we’d been crying around men to try to convince them to have sex when really we should have been doing the exact opposite!

And…yet…more questions arise. What if men only see your tears and don’t smell them? What if they drink your tears? What if everybody’s blindfolded? And what about women smelling MEN’S tears, huh? Huh?

According to the New York Times, “the researchers started with women because when they advertised for ‘volunteers who can cry with ease,’ they could not find men who were ‘good criers,’ readily able to fill collection vials.” They’ve since remedied that situation.